Mallacoota Weather and Wildlife: A right Charlie's Creek track.

I have read a few explanations of why, in English slang, the phrase "a right Charlie" means a fool. This one is well off (my understanding of) the mark, and I suggest the author gets professional help. I was always told that it is a reference to Mr Chaplin, reflecting the number of daft situations in which the Little Tramp finds himself. Whatever: the meaning seems to have a fair application to the walk we did today, shown in the following extract from Google Earth.

I will come back to this a little later, but as a depiction of the two tracks I'd say the material Google accessed was an approximation drawn by someone in the Bairnsdale or Melbourne offices of Parks who has never been East of Orbost. And their drafting tool was the famous "thumbnail dipped in tar".

Here is the track which eBird logged from where we actually went.

At an early point we came across this sad specimen. I have asked iNaturalist for suggestions about identification (the first suggestion by their AI - emphasising 'Artificial' rather than 'Intelligence' - was European Dormouse).

The track - well cleared (presumably to let the Parks contractors get to rebuild the jetty at the end) is surrounded by densely regenerating Acacia scrub of which A. terminalis was well into bud.

The bloodwoods (Corymbia gummifera) were well into flower, explaining why a proportion of the fruit bat flyout has been pointing in this direction.

It never fails to astonish me how the autofocus function on my camera will find something other than my target to focus on. In this case it has ignored the blossom (~80% of the image) and gone for Frances arm (~5% ) in the background.

A nice new jetty with some anglers well ensconced. When we were last here (before the fire) the piles of the jetty were covered with sea squirts: they have yet to re-establish.

A Pelican passed over, giving me at least one bird snap.

Here is the eBird track. Many diversions from that shown on Google Earth, amounting to an extra kilometre of distance. It also suggests far better the amount of ups and downs along the way rather than the flat track I had been expecting from the straight line on Google Earth.

Flowers were generally hard to find. A pretty little Dianella sp.

An orchid! Eriocholus cucculatis , with the vernacular name Parson's Bands: the column etc always makes me think of a ranting evangelist, rather than a timid Parson.

I find it hard to capture steepness in photos. This was one of the early gullies which the track took. This was quite a surprise as on our previous foray (from the Double Creek car parking area) partway along the track the difficulty had been flooding rather than altitude sickness.

The contrast between the burnt black branches and the green foliage justified this image.

Two interesting holes: I think Bandicoot, but advice has been sought.

An attractive butterfly kept fluttering in front of us. Every time it landed it shut its wings rendering itself both less attractive and harder to find against the fallen leaves.

Eventually I got a shot of the upper wings: a Variable Sword-grass Brown (Tisiphone abeona).

Colourful Gahnia sp. fruit

Finally we get to Charlie's Creek: by this stage I had realised that the track shown on Google Earth was garbage, as we had already done 2.9km and that shown was only 3km. It was also interesting that the last1 kilometre we had walked had had NO maintenance from Parks for at least 2 years, and possibly not since the fire.

I had hoped that with the shiny new signs at each end of the track they would have fixed up the crossing here. Hah: I am talking about Viv Parks here.